Anonymous calls for May Day protests over CISPA

Trent Nouveau, 30th April 2012

The cyber security legislation - which the Obama administration has vowed to veto - would effectively negate existing privacy laws by allowing companies to share user data with the government without a court order.

"To the citizens of the United States of America: We are Anonymous. This is a special emergency message regarding the status of the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act," a synthesized voice intoned in a video posted on YouTube.

"CISPA has passed the legislature. We are calling upon the citizens of the United States to physically protest. This includes all the Occupy (OWS) movement. Our rights are being taken away."

Meanwhile, OWS is also gearing up for demonstrations tomorrow across the globe, with marches planned in Toronto, Barcelona, London, Kuala Lumpur and Sydney, as well as hundreds of cities in North America, Europe and Asia.

In New York, OWS is set to join numerous labor organizations observing May 1, or International Workers' Day. Marches are expected from Union Square to Lower Manhattan, along with a "pop-up occupation" of Bryant Park on Sixth Avenue, across the street from Bank of America's Corp.'s 55-story tower.

"We call upon people to refrain from shopping, walk out of class, take the day off of work and other creative forms of resistance disrupting the status quo," organizers said in an April 26 e-mail cited by Bloomberg.

"If the banks anticipate outrage from everyday citizens, it's revealing of their own guilt," Shane Patrick, a member of the Occupy Wall Street press team added. "If they hadn't been participating in maneuvers that sent the economy into the ditch, we wouldn't even be having this conversation."